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Comment by Zardoz84 | Hacker News Reader

I feel pity for anyone that are forced to develop on Windows.

I use Windows to develop at home, and Ubuntu at work. I much prefer Windows. The only advantage Linux has is the terminal environment. The GUI is crappy. The memory handling is atrocious, if it starts swapping it'll freeze for twenty minutes before the OOM killer finally kicks in. Multiple monitor use is a crap shoot, I'll always get one black screen after resuming from suspend. Windows is miles more stable. And this on a Dell XPS 15 which is supposed to have great Linux support.

There are two major and many smaller desktop environments for Linux. KDE is more like Windows, you could try that. (sudo apt install tasksel; sudo tasksel install kubuntu-full to get a KUbuntu equivalent, or just sudo apt install kde-full for the main things. Though you may well have a colleague already using KDE.)

Unless you need it for the type of work you do, you could disable swap, or reduce it to a small amount.

(I don't have a laptop, so I can't comment on suspend.)

Could you please elaborate why? I found macos/ios to be the most annoying platform to develop on by far, expecially if you are trying to make some kind of cross-platform software. For webdev grunt work, in 2022, I think there are no dramatic differences between the 3 OS...

I used to develop on Linux, but eventually wanted something that "just works" so I switched back to Windows. Much less time spent tinkering and more time spent getting things done, and WSL saves me from having to learn Powershell (even if I only hear good things about it).

Never even considered MacOS as an option. Not as good for tinkering as Linux, and with 17% market share (both in my country and global average) it can't deliver the "everyone supports this, everything just works" that I got with Windows (it also doesn't help that Apple lately seems to happily break anything not sold by them)

17% market share for MacOS? That seems high?

It's actually more like 15% globally, if you use statcounter.com numbers [1]. I was being generous by using the early 2021 numbers. Statista probably uses the same source [2]. Netmarketshare puts it at about 10% [3]

1: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

2: https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...

3: https://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.asp...

> I used to develop on Linux, but eventually wanted something that "just works" so I switched back to Windows. Much less time spent tinkering and more time spent getting things done, and WSL saves me from having to learn Powershell (even if I only hear good things about it).

I must be the strange one here since WSL is a hardcore nope from me. Mainly because I've gave that setup a chance last year and then after two hours of work I've noticed Windows git or WSL changed all my carriage returns to CLRF and basically broke all scripts and pipelines.

I just finished off a program to show which files use CRLF and which use LF. It also shows results for TAB, NUL, BOM-8 and BOM-16:

https://github.com/jftuga/chars

You can use the -f switch to help with pipelines and -j for JSON output.

> I used to develop on Linux, but eventually wanted something that "just works" so I switched back to Windows. Much less time spent tinkering and more time spent getting things done

I started recommending WSL on Windows to a few friends who wanted to get a taste of how Linux works after hearing praises about it although I've never actually used it myself. I recently realized that systemd doesn't work on WSL (without ugly hacks) and /mnt also mounts Windows disks.

I have stopped recommending WSL since then. Although I don't recommend anyone to use Linux either.

WSL works pretty well for typical command line usage (your typical "grep | sort | uniq" stuff) or for "this command line tool only runs/compiles on linux" usecases. If you push it much more than the abstraction starts getting leaky and you have to get more involved (though WSL2 can be pushed a lot more, e.g. getting systemd running in WSL2 doesn't seem that bad [1]).

1: https://gist.github.com/djfdyuruiry/6720faa3f9fc59bfdf6284ee...

systemd doesn't work on WSL? Blessed Microsoft.

I've switched to Windows from Ubuntu on my desktop for development. I do miss some things but WSL2 is surprisingly good, the bluetooth stack doesn't randomly fail (as often) and having access to Windows and Linux tools at the same time without having to dual boot is very useful

I develop on Windows voluntarily. Funnily I was not able to set-up Docker with CUDA on any of the Linux distributions I have tried, but on Windows with WSL it worked pretty much out of the box.

In the past I always found Visual Studio to be a solid dev environment. This was for C++, where the debugger was unmatched by anything else.

Things may have changed since then (8+ years ago)?

I use CLion on Ubuntu and it's an absolute joy to use. Debugger is absolutely on par with VS in my opinion - and if you are missing something, gdb is always avaliable within a terminal.

Exactly. I started using it on my personal machine so that I can get used to it and make my work experience less shitty.

Why? My career as been split pretty close to 50/50 between developing on *nix and Windows. And while both have strengths and weaknesses I wouldn't say one is better than the other. If you put a gun to my head and said I could only use one desktop OS for the rest of my life I would probably choose Windows.

I develop on Windows and Linux, and I'm ok with Windows.

What are the main disadvantages to develop on Windows?

From someone who has done heavy development on both - I would say it's quite difficult to get used to the filesystem, non-POSIX (which is why mac users and linux users tend to find affinity), windows API being a bit arcane (Things like user-groups, event viewer, and process explorer being mostly dated UI apps with unique and strange windows API calls), services vs daemons, session-zero.

I would say it's great at a user level, but under the covers you have to be a true windows grognard to know what is going on.

This is why I don't use windows. Compared to Linux, everything feels strange and obfuscated

Some might pity you for not being able to add those beefy GPU-s into your setup. I know, external GPU-s exists, which is cool if you miss the Commodore 64 era of plugging a bunch of devices together.

It's not because you don't understand something that other people cannot live with it. Dare I say, I pity such lack of imagination? FWIW I use both limux and windows, if that even matters.

I call it "Windads" these days. Because so many Ads!

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